Episode #252 ... Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut

Philosophize This!

This episode explores Kurt Vonnegut's novel 'Slaughterhouse-Five,' examining its themes of trauma, time, free will, and existential coping m

Key takeaways

• Billy Pilgrim's 'unstuck in time' experience mirrors the fragmented, non-linear nature of trauma and memory.
• The Tralfamadorian philosophy—accepting all moments as simultaneous—functions as a coping mechanism for dealing with unavoidable suffering.

Main topics

• Trauma and memory in literature
• Non-linear narrative structure

Notable quotes

'Billy Pilgrim is unstuck in time.'

Conclusion

Slaughterhouse-Five is not just a war novel but a profound philosophical meditation on trauma, time, and the

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Hello, everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This. Patreon.com slash philosophizethis. Philosophical writing on Substack at philosophizethis on there. I hope you love the show today. So I want to start today by telling you about a guy named Kurt Vonnegut. Kurt Vonnegut was an author born in the U.S. year 1922, which was an interesting year to be born because it placed him in perfect position to be coming of age during the opening stages of the Second World War. And being in this spot, the choice he makes is rather than sit around and wait to be called up and drafted into the military by force, he decides he's just going to enlist and at least have some kind of marginal control over what his own fate's going to be. Speaker 1 (0:38) When he gets to the war, he's assigned to the 106th Infantry Division as an intelligence scout, which meant that for his job, he would often be a guy that's on the battlefield, and he'd have to push forward, sometimes behind enemy lines, to secretly get information about the position of the enemy. Now, on December 19th, 1944, Vonnegut was fighting in the very famous now Battle of the Bulge. In the middle of the battle, his whole unit becomes encircled by a bunch of Nazis he was fighting. So typical of those guys. Speaker 1 (1:05) So he was captured and he was transported to a German POW camp to be held until they knew what to do with him next. Now, from this point, he seems to have gotten shuffled around quite a bit. They put him on a train and sent him to the city of Dresden, where he was made to be part of what's called a labor detachment. Now, what this meant is that he would spend his days doing forced labor for the Germans. In this case, he was forced to make malt syrup, specially designed for pregnant women to get nutrition during wartime. All throughout his time doing this, his temporary housing as a prisoner while he lived there, Speaker 1 (1:33) was in a slaughterhouse complex known only at the time as Slaughterhouse Five. So he keeps working with all the other captured prisoners around him until a couple months later in February of 1945, there's the infamous attack on the city of Dresden by the Royal Air Force and the rest of the Allies. When the attack starts that day, it sends him and everybody else working around him fleeing underground of this slaughterhouse complex, all hiding in a meat locker, just hoping the bombs wouldn't blast through the ground enough to get to them. Speaker 1 (1:59) Now, the history of Dresden as an attack that went on has been well documented by historians at this point. For two days, apparently, the city was bombed from above in waves. There were over 22,000 dead, many of them civilians. It's often seen as one of the most violent attacks by the Allies in all of the Second World War. People still talk about it to this day. And when Vonnegut and the rest of the prisoners emerged from under the slaughterhouse and saw the city of Dresden left in ruins, well, the site of it all was only the beginning. Speaker 1 (2:25) because the German officers then put him and all the rest of his fellow prisoners to work digging bodies out of the basements of the destroyed city. Fast forward a bit. Once Kurt Vonnegut got home after the war, he wanted to write a book about all the experiences he had, especially this one in Dresden. But for 20 years, Vonnegut struggled to find the right way to do it. So much so that when he died in the year 2007, few different people have gone through all of his manuscripts and his notes, and they found out after the fact that he had multiple serious attempts at writing this book over the years. Speaker 1 (2:53) but that he abandoned almost all of them partway through because something just wasn't right about it to him. The one that he didn't abandon, though, the one that he eventually published, became among the most popular books of the 20th century called Slaughterhouse-Five. It's one of the most requested books I've ever been asked to cover on this podcast over the years. It's got a bit of everything in it. Time travel, humor, alien abductions, where the aliens give the main character kind of a hot stone massage and then explain their whole theory of the universe to him. Speaker 1 (3:19) It's obvious why this book is so loved by people who are interested in getting into philosophy more. And while it'd be silly to treat this book like it's an ambitious philosophical work that's trying to do the same thing Kant was doing or Plato or something, I do think it can be valuable to talk about where the philosophy in it begins and ends. In fact, at some points, I think it's even valuable to take the philosophy a couple levels deeper than it goes in the book as a way of understanding the real depth of the questions posed by Vonnegut here, even if it's only alluded to. Speaker 1 (3:46) At the very least, we're going to familiarize ourselves with a classic here today, one that without question dramatizes certain pieces of philosophy far better than many philosophers or textbooks ever managed to do. This is a book where the images in it stick with you, whether you like it or not, which is usually a sign of great writing. That said, to get started on this, when Kurt Vonnegut finally settles on what he thought was at least an okay way to write this book, he ends up writing a story that's like very few other stories you will ever read in your life. Speaker 1 (4:13) Most of the book is written following the main character, a guy named Billy Pilgrim, where from the perspective of the main character all throughout the book, he seems to be someone who is unpredictably and almost constantly shifting through moments in his life, like he's skipping around in time throughout the book. The way it's described is that Billy Pilgrim is, quote, unstuck in time, end quote. What this looks like is that one day he'll be in his childhood, he'll go to sleep and he might wake up on his wedding day, cut to him again, and all of a sudden he's in the middle of a war zone as a soldier. Speaker 1 (4:41) To be clear, he can't control any of this that's going on, but this is how he experiences his life, so it becomes clear to us as readers that this is also going to have to be the way we become familiar with him if we want to get to know him. So for the sake of clarity, as your philosophical Sherpa, I'm going to take some of these events that are usually skipping all around in the book, and I'm going to put them into more of a chronological order so that we can first get to why Vonnegut chooses to present them exactly in this way, which will then set us up for the philosophy. Speaker 1 (5:07) What you see very quickly in the book is that the main character, Billy Pilgrim, has a lot of similarities to Vonnegut himself, but he's also different in ways that will become important too. See, Billy was also born in 1922, but he was born into a town called Elium, New York. He grows up, goes to optometry school, and then during World War II, he gets drafted into the army, trained as a chaplain's assistant of all things, and eventually he gets sent over to Europe where he's thrown under the front lines of the war. Speaker 1 (5:34) And when we get descriptions of the kind of warrior Billy is, how he faces combat on the battlefield when he's out there, well, it's part of the whole comedy of the book. It's actually pretty hilarious. Most of the time, he's this really passive soldier. Doesn't want to fight. Doesn't really know how. Doesn't even have a gun most of the time to be able to fight with. So it's important to know that to most of the people around him, they see him as only a burden when one day he finds himself wandering behind enemy lines alongside two scouts that are looking for the enemy and one other young soldier named Roland Weary. Speaker 1 (6:03) Now, Roland Weary in this book is a whole nother level of pathetic, but it's a different brand of pathetic than Billy is. See, this kid, I mean, picture an 18-year-old young gentleman sent to a war zone who's fully bought into this story that he's a heroic warrior that's saving the world, constantly showing off all his weapons, talking about how he's going to torture him some Nazis whenever he finds them. Now, in direct contrast to this, there's Billy. Speaker 1 (6:29) who, with his spirit dwindling at this point, you know, he didn't even want to be in this war in the first place, he decides at a certain point that he's just done with the war. He's going to sit down, lay in the fetal position. He asks the whole group to leave him behind so he doesn't mess with them any more than he already has. Roland Weary, being the self-appointed hero of this war, stays back to try to save him. And in the whole process of all this, the two scouts they were with get killed by the enemy, and Billy and Roland get captured. Now, the soldiers are captured by on the German side. Speaker 1 (6:56) are hardly what you'd expect when you think of grizzled warriors as well. It's five people in total. There's two teenage boys, two old men, and one exhausted middle-aged corporal who has already been wounded several times in the war so far. Some of them are obviously wearing the clothes of people who have recently been killed. And one of the first things they have Billy and Roland do when they capture them is to restage the moment of their capture for the camera so they can send the propaganda photo out to be distributed among the people. Just saying. Speaker 1 (7:23) far from some highly trained elite unit that's operating on honor and justice. And from here, the story of Billy and Roland starts to resemble Vonnegut's own story. Sent to Dresden, refuge in a slaughterhouse, made to dig out bodies after the city has been destroyed. And most importantly, the moment we're told over and over again in the book is going to be the climax of everything that happens. A fellow prisoner that's helping to dig out the bodies from under all the rubble of Dresden. When he's working one day and steals a teapot from some of the rubble that hadn't been destroyed. Speaker 1 (7:51) With no trial, he is executed on site for looting as a way to maintain the order of things during wartime. Now let's pause for a moment and talk about what Vonnegut intends by all this going on so far in the book. An important detail for context on all of this is that when Vonnegut's doing the prep work to be able to write this book, he decided to visit one of his old war buds, and he got into a conversation with his wife, a woman named Mary O'Hare.